


When the world comes in

by bluejbird



Series: Interconnected [7]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, M/M, Minor Character Death, Soulmates, Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 10:32:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8887525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluejbird/pseuds/bluejbird
Summary: Everyone is blessed with a gift, but Jim's isn't as exciting or useful as the rest of his family. His gift is dreaming of his soulmate. As hard as it is to watch his soulmate live without him, the dreams provide comfort during times when Jim would otherwise give up. 
Or, the one where Jim spends his life dreaming of Bones.





	

When Jim is five, his mother comes back to Earth and takes him to the Centre. He’s excited, because sometimes he forgets what his mom looks like, and Sam sits him down and plays old holovids, but it’s never quite the same as her being home. So he’s excited to see her, but he’s even more excited to get his gift. 

Everyone gets a gift. Some gifts are cool, like Sam’s ability to run super fast, fast enough that he can make it to the end of the road and back before Jim’s even halfway. Some gifts make people sad, like his mom’s gift of always knowing which direction is home, even out amongst the stars. Some gifts save lives, like his dad’s gift of being able to see ten seconds into the future, which Sam says is how he knew what to do to get Jim and their mom and everyone else off the Kelvin. 

Some gifts aren’t so cool, like one of the kids at school who can change the colour of his eyes to anything he wants, which is pretty but pointless. And some gifts just make Jim’s life harder. Like Frank, who always knows when people are lying to him. It doesn’t stop the boys from doing it, but it does make the beatings worse if it happens too often. 

Jim desperately wants a good gift. A useful one, that will mean he can follow in his parents’ footsteps. He can’t wait to find out what he’ll get. So he holds tightly to his mom’s hand, tugging her forward to make her hurry as they step inside the huge white building. 

Inside it’s all floor to ceiling glass and shining metal, and Jim’s eyes are wide in wonder. He walks a little closer to his mother. They join a queue of other kids Jim’s age, all lined up with their parents. It’s a rite of passage – you turn five years old, and you receive your gift. 

When it’s their turn, Jim hesitates, but Winona nudges him by the shoulder, telling him to step forward. He follows the woman in a crisp white uniform into a little room, and they sit him on a chair. 

There are machines all around him that buzz and hum, and three operators who say things he doesn’t understand to each other. 

One of them smiles at him. “What are you hoping for, kid?” he asks. 

“Invisibility,” Jim says, thinking of all of the mischief he can get up to, and how angry it’ll make Frank if he can’t find him. “Or flight.”

The man ruffles his hair, which Jim hates. “Sorry kid,” he says, “we’re fresh out of comic book powers. Let’s see what we have for you instead.”

They strap him down, and the computer makes beeping grinding whirring noises and then there’s a flash of light and a brief moment of searing pain that makes Jim’s eyes water. He bites his tongue but doesn’t cry out, because he’s learned never to let people know when he’s in pain. 

And then the man is standing in front of him again, undoing the straps. 

“What do I get?” Jim asks. He’d expected to feel different, somehow, but he doesn’t feel anything. 

The man glances at the screen, showing the randomly generated gift of which Jim is now the proud owner.

“You,” he says with a smile, “get a dreaming gift.”

Jim wrinkles his nose for a moment. He’s heard of those before. One of his teachers dreams of things she’s forgotten, which sounds terrible. But he’s heard of people who dream lottery numbers, or who dream of the future. If he could win a billion credits, he could buy them somewhere better to live, hire someone better to look after them. And if he could dream of the future, maybe he’d know that there was something good waiting out there. For him, and Sam. 

“What do I get to dream about?” he asks, hopping down from the chair. 

“Your soulmate,” the man says, grin widening, like it’s a wonderful gift. Like it’s the best gift he’s ever heard of. Jim is not convinced.

“I want a different one,” Jim protests. “I want a cool gift. Not some lame soulmate gift.” He pouts, hoping that the man will think he’s adorable enough to give him a do-over. 

Instead the man laughs, “Sorry kid,” he says. “One gift per customer. The computer chose it for you, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

He gestures over the woman who’d shown Jim into the room, and she takes him by the hand and leads him away. Jim looks back over his shoulder at the chair, wondering why the computer is punishing him. 

“Well?” his mom asks eagerly.

“It’s a crock of shit,” Jim says, scuffing the toe of his sneaker on the ground. 

A woman nearby gasps and covers her daughter’s ears, glaring at Jim’s mom. 

Winona smothers a smile. “Jim!” she admonishes, but her eyes are dancing. She takes him by the hand and they drive home, Jim whining the whole way about his crappy gift. 

They’re almost home when Winona looks at him. “Sometimes I wish that was my gift,” she says. “Then maybe I’d still dream about your father.”

Jim shuts up then, and when he gets home and Sam finds out and teases him, he lets it roll of his back and pretends he doesn’t care, remembering the wistful look on her face.

The dreams start that night, although he doesn’t realise it then. It’s a month later when he wakes up in the middle of the night, and realises there’s a recurring character in his dreams. 

A boy. A boy who is older than him, maybe about Sam’s age or even a bit older. 

The fact that it’s a boy surprises him a little. Not that it’s exactly unusual, but he’d always assumed he’d grow up and like girls only. Like his dad. Like Sam, probably, even though Sam is only 8 and can’t predict the future, no matter how often he tries to convince Jim that he got two gifts, and knows when Jim is going to get a beating next. 

Mostly though, he’s just curious. It’s kinda cool to be able to spy on someone’s life. The dreams are hazy at first, and difficult to remember, but over time they get clearer, and Jim is able to pick out his own random imaginations from the little snapshots of his soulmate’s life. 

The boy who he’s destined to be with has brown eyes and dark hair. He’s serious and doesn’t smile easily, which is so different from Jim that it scares him sometimes. He doesn’t know much else about the boy – the dreams are silent, and distant, like he’s watching a flickering holovid where the colours are kind of muddy. 

Some nights he doesn’t remember his dreams at all, but he finds himself drawing pictures later. He thinks they might be memories, but he can’t know for sure. He draws pictures of the boy riding a horse. Of the boy with a girl who looks like him, maybe a sister. Of the boy sitting under a tree, reading a book. 

Jim makes sure Sam and Frank don’t see the pictures. Sam, because he’ll tease him. Frank, because Jim doesn’t know what he’d do, unpredictable as always. So he folds them up and puts them in an old tin that he buries in the field behind their house. 

For the most part life doesn’t exactly change, with this gift. It’s not like some gifts where the kids are immediately whisked off to a special school to learn to control them better. Jim goes to a regular school. He gets into trouble. He hides from Frank, and sends comms to Winona that don’t let on what’s really happening. And he grows up. 

Not long after he turns 10, he dreams of the boy sitting at a table in front of a cake with 16 candles on it, and he adds that to his mental list of Things He Knows. He writes the date down too – January 20th, even though he’s not entirely sure how accurate the timing of his dreams are. Even when he goes to sleep at the same time, his dreams may be set during the day or night, with no noticeable pattern. 

Lately the dreams are becoming clearer. The images he sees have sharper edges, brighter colours. Jim feels like he could almost reach out and touch, if he wanted. He wonders if the boy would run through the cornfields with him, and what his laugh would sound like. 

By the time Jim is twelve, he’s not watching anymore. He’s always felt like he’s been sitting in a dark room, watching events unfold on a screen. But now he finds himself inside the dreams. He can walk around, moving from place to place, so long as he stays close by the boy. He’s completely invisible, and can’t interact with anything, and when he tries to touch his hand passes through like a hologram. But it makes things more interesting, because now he can see details. 

He can see that there’s a hint of gold in the boy’s eyes. He can see the names of books that sit in a pile on the table. But the one thing he can’t see is the boy’s name. He knows it’s there – he can see certificates tacked on the wall and trophies on shelves, but when he tries to get closer, to make out the letters that spell the name he’s desperate to know, his vision blurs. Sometimes he thinks he reads it, but when he wakes up, the name escapes him. It tickles inside his head, frustrating him, like a word on the tip of your tongue that you just can’t quite to say. 

He doesn’t know what he’d do with the information if he did have a name. Track the boy down, maybe. Tell him who he is. He’s pretty sure that the boy would roll his eyes and say, “Get lost, kid.” Because that’s what Jim is. The boy is really a man now. He’s gone off to college, and Jim’s dreams are mostly just watching him study. He recognises the subjects – Biology, Chemistry, Physics – and feels an odd sense of pride and satisfaction. His soulmate is smart. Super smart, if the graded exams Jim catches glimpses of are anything to go by. Everyone says Jim is smart too, although he doesn’t apply himself. He thinks maybe that should change, that maybe he should make himself a bit more worthy of his soulmate. So he starts trying harder at school. 

Sometimes Sam or Frank or his friends mention dreams they’ve had. Sam is obsessed with surfing at the moment, possibly because they’re completely landlocked and he’s a contrary teenager who only likes things he can’t have. But he shares stories at breakfast about riding giant waves, or climbing volcanoes. And sometimes, when Frank isn’t around to know it’s a lie, Jim shares exciting dreams, too. 

In reality, his non-soulmate dreams are generally pretty uneventful. The only dreams he ever remembers now are ones of his soulmate. And he’s hardly living a thrilling life. It makes Jim jealous sometimes, of how other people can escape into ridiculous dreams. But he enjoys wandering around his soulmate’s dorm room, peering over his shoulder when he can. It might not be interesting, but at least Jim knows he’s safe. And that’s a comforting feeling. 

Then one night he dreams himself back into the dorm room. Something is different, and it takes him a moment to realise his soulmate isn’t alone. That’s not that unusual – he’s seen friends and roommates and family members and sometimes random strangers – but this time it’s different. 

Because his soulmate is clearly on a date. 

Jim has watched him go on plenty of dates before. It’s never bothered him, and mostly he feels a smug sense of satisfaction when the girl or guy disappears from the dreams, because he knows it hasn’t worked out. And Jim feels bad for them, pities them. Because of course it won’t work out. How can it, when Jim is his soulmate. There’s no way that he feels a strong enough connection to any of them to make it last. 

He remembers watching his soulmate’s first kiss – obvious from how awkward everything was – and although Jim had only just started to be curious about kissing, he’d wondered what their first kiss together would be like. He knows it doesn’t matter how many people they each kiss, none of it will matter once Jim kisses him. So he’s never been jealous before. 

He feels it now though. It surges through him, and he’s never felt emotion like this before. He’s felt anger and betrayal and sadness, but never jealousy. Not like this. 

Because he knows what his soulmate is about to do. He’s seen this before – walked in on Sam doing it at least once, and he’s definitely got a whole lot of curiosity around it himself. But he’d never considered that he’d have to watch his soulmate do this with someone. 

It’s stupid, really. Jim might be 12, but his soulmate is 18, and of course he’s going to have sex if he wants to. It’s just that Jim had heard all the stuff they spout in school about waiting until you’re with the right person and he’d just assumed that his soulmate would do that. Wait. For Jim. 

Jim watches them undress, and it feels incredibly wrong but he can’t look away. He’s seen his soulmate naked before – sometimes the dreams have shown him dressing or showering or skinny dipping in a lake. But never like this. It causes strange new sensations in his body, odd thoughts in his head. He lets his focus move to the girl instead, stares at her chest, just because he can. 

Then Jim watches her cup his soulmate’s cheek and he can’t stand it anymore. 

“Don’t do it,” he says. 

His soulmate goes still, and pulls away from the girl, turning to look over his shoulder. He looks right where Jim’s standing, right at Jim, and for one heartstopping moment Jim thinks that maybe he’s seen him. 

Then the girl says something, and his soulmate shrugs his shoulders and turns back. He hushes her, murmurs something against her skin. 

The girl does something with her hand that Jim can’t see, and his soulmate moans. 

Jim screws his eyes shut and wishes himself awake. And for the first time, it works immediately. 

He lies in bed, odd clenching sensations in his heart and groin, and that moan echoing in his ears. 

He doesn’t realise until later that it’s the first time he’s distinctly heard sound. And as much as he hates what he’s witnessed, as much as it twists him up with jealousy, he wants to hear more. 

His next dream is two days later, and the sound comes in and out, like a radio tuning in to a frequency, but he can hear some things. He’s in a lecture theatre, and a professor is talking about something Jim doesn’t understand. And then his soulmate leans across and says something to another student. When he wakes up, Jim doesn’t even remember what he said, just the soft drawl. 

He adds that to his Things He Knows list. It helps him narrow down where his soulmate is from, where he is now. Somewhere on the same continent. Somewhere south. 

Somewhere close. 

Six months later, Winona comes home unexpectedly. She bursts into the house in a whirlwind of fury and motion, and by the look on Frank’s face, he isn’t expecting her either. She drops a kiss on the top of Jim’s head, then takes Frank in another room. 

There’s a lot of shouting, mostly muffled, and the sound of things breaking. Jim starts towards the door, determined that Frank won’t do to their mother what he’s done to them, but Sam appears  out of nowhere and stops him. 

“Don’t,” Sam says. Jim looks at his brother, how the bruises have faded, but the broken skin is still  healing. He’ll probably have a scar as a painful reminder of just how far Frank can go. 

Jim wonders how long it takes to get to Earth from wherever Winona’s ship was. He wonders if it’s exactly the same amount of time between now and when Frank had punched Sam in the face so hard that Jim had been scared his brother wouldn’t survive it.

They leave Iowa that night with just the belongings they can carry hastily shoved into bags. As they leave, Jim thinks about his tin box buried in the field, with all of his pictures and notes on his soulmate inside. He almost asks Winona to wait, to let him get it, but there’s a cold, broken look in her eyes that lets him know the answer would be no. 

They end up on a shuttle, then on a ship, heading to Tarsus IV. Jim doesn’t know where it is, exactly, but Winona has an aunt and uncle there who’ll look after them until she can transfer somewhere closer, somewhere they can all be together. Judging by the look on Sam’s face, he doesn’t quite believe her, but Jim is willing to believe, for once.

Jim doesn’t care where they go, as long as they can travel in space. There’s a thrill to it, being out in the darkness, hurtling through the void. He knows it should scare him, the way it scares Sam, whose knuckles are clenched and white for the entire duration of their trip. But Jim isn’t scared, not of space. Maybe it’s because he was born in it. Born of it. It feels right to be out in the black, travelling faster and further than he’d imagined possible.

He’s so enthralled that it takes him almost a week to realise he hasn’t had any dreams. He panics as soon as he realises, wondering if something’s happened to his soulmate. He mentions it to Sam, who seems friendlier now that they’re away from Frank, and he suggests that maybe it’s because they’re not on Earth anymore. 

Jim resists the urge to run to Winona, or to the captain, and ask them to turn around. Falling asleep and seeing his soulmate has become the safe, constant thing in his life. 

But that night, finally, he dreams again. It’s not exactly a dream he wants to witness – this time his soulmate is making out with a sandy-haired man – but he’ll take it. It’s fainter than usual, fuzzy in patches that are maybe due to the distance. But the dreams continue when they arrive at their new home, and over time get clearer again. 

Tarsus IV is safe but boring. They help out their aunt and uncle on the farm, and Jim hates it all, the dust and the dirt. But Sam thrives. His hair grows long and his skin grows tanned and the tension starts to leave his shoulders. 

The first time Jim hears Sam’s joyful laughter, it hits him like a punch to the gut. He can’t remember the last time he heard his brother genuinely laugh. He’s heard mean chuckles, and derisive snorts, and tone heavily laden with sarcasm. And he’s heard the forced, fake laugh they’d both developed in response to Frank’s terrible jokes, in an effort to delay his anger. But he’s never heard Sam really, truly sound happy. 

It makes Jim wonder how much Sam had shielded him from back on Earth. He thinks of the beatings, of the shit Frank would say, and wonders how much worse it was for Sam. He’s glad Sam gets to be happy now, and even though Jim hates it on Tarsus, he pretends he doesn’t. For Sam. 

In typical fashion, as soon as Jim starts to feel settled, everything goes to shit. And it’s not just Jim who hates the colony. Sam hates it too. They watch from the treeline as their aunt and uncle, their cousins and neighbours, get rounded up and executed. It almost doesn’t feel real, but the screams and the sounds of phaser fire are clearer, more raw, than anything Jim’s ever heard in a holo. By then they’re so hungry they barely have the energy to move, but they have to. They have to get away, stay unseen, keep themselves safe. They slip away, with a handful of other kids, out into the forest. 

They scavenge for food and hope that someone will come to find them. Somehow, they survive. Sam, as the oldest, takes charge, makes sure everyone has someone to watch over them, makes sure everyone gets a fair share of whatever food they scrounge up. And Jim helps, follows orders, pretends not to see how the hope has gone from Sam’s eyes, or how quickly he’d stopped laughing.   

When Jim dreams now, he envies his soulmate for the life he’s living. He watches him graduate, watches him spend his summer working with his father, watches him smile and laugh and eat and live. But it’s an escape from the nightmare of his days. Other kids reminisce about things they miss from home, as their escape, but Jim stays silent and thinks about his soulmate.

Sometimes he thinks it would be easy to walk into town and get shot. It’d be over then. He wouldn’t have to feel the pain of hunger, or taste grass and dirt when it’s the only thing they have to fill their stomachs. He won’t have to hear the little kids cry, or see the hardness return to Sam’s features. 

But then he wonders what the future will have in store for his soulmate without him. He thinks about never meeting the boy he’s watched become a man. He thinks about whether it’ll cause him pain, when Jim dies. And he can’t do that to him, just like he can’t leave Sam all alone.

It’s not much, but it’s enough to keep him fighting. To keep him moving. 

It’s enough that when he and Sam sneak into the town in search of medicine and food, he’s careful. He moves silently, barely breathes, hyperaware of everything around him. 

They slip in and out of buildings, taking what they need. And they’re almost clear and free when someone shouts behind them. 

“Go,” Jim says to Sam, shoving the medicine into his arms. “Run.”

Jim knows that with Sam’s gift, he could cover the distance to the shelter of the trees before he can blink. He knows Sam hasn’t used his gift much. Running track in school hadn’t appealed to him, and as much as Jim knew he’d wanted to run far, far away from Frank, he couldn’t use it without leaving Jim behind. 

Sam won’t leave Jim now. He refuses to run on ahead, holding onto Jim’s elbow and urging him forward instead. 

Maybe it’s the connection between them, his hand on Jim’s arm, that causes Jim to feel it. To feel the shock of the phaser fire that hits Sam in the back. 

They fall together, and Jim sees it, the moment when life leaves his brother. He sees his eyes go dull and glassy. Feels his hand fall from Jim’s skin. 

Jim lies in the grass afterwards, unable to move. For one horrible, hopeful moment he thinks that maybe he was mistaken, that the phasers were set to stun, and they’ve both been hit with that. And then he looks at Sam, who doesn’t look back. Who can’t look back. And he thinks about staying there, letting them find him, letting it all be over. 

But he can’t. It’s not who he is. Winona has told them stories about George, about what he’d done, so that they knew the truth, not the fantasy the media spun each year on Jim’s birthday. They were both like him, she’d said. Thinking about the safety of others, putting the needs of others ahead of their own. 

Jim thinks of the kid who needs the medicine, of the nine hungry mouths that need feeding. Sam had taken on that responsibility as the oldest. 

Jim is the oldest now. 

He scoops up the bag of food and meds, lifting his head enough to check that the coast is clear, that they’re not coming for him yet. And then he runs. He runs as if Sam is running beside him, faster and faster. He runs as if Sam’s gift had transferred to him, runs as if his muscles aren’t wasting and his lungs aren’t screaming from the exertion. 

And he makes it back. He doesn’t tell the others what happened. He lies and says Sam will be back, but he knows none of them believe him. 

He tries not to think about Sam’s body lying in the grass, and whether it’ll still be there the next time he has to go into town to thieve.

But there is no next time. The ships come, and for so much violence and death before, there’s very little after. 

When they’re found, Jim stands in front of the kids, shields them, until he’s sure the new arrivals safe. It’s the Starfleet patches on their shirts that relax him, and he wonders if it’s Winona’s ship. Wonders if he’ll have to be the one to tell her. 

He never knows how she finds out. He sleeps the entire way back to Earth, whether through exhaustion or medication he doesn’t know. He dreams the entire way home, sees more and more of his soulmate’s life – now at medical school, he thinks, judging by the books he carries and the classes he takes. And it’s not a salvation anymore. All Jim can see when he looks at the man is a future that he probably doesn’t deserve. Because why should Jim have a future when Sam’s was stolen?

When Jim wakes up in a hospital on Earth with an IV in his arm, Winona is sitting beside him looking old. He’d never thought of her that way before. But she looks worn and tired. 

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” she says, and holds him as he cries. He feels her tears soak into his hospital gown, and he wonders when she’ll leave him too. 

But she stays. They find a small place, back in Iowa, but far away from Frank. The old house belongs to them, passed down the Kirk line, but they don’t go back and Jim doesn’t ask why.

Winona is miserable, so Jim tries to be good. He goes to school, and pretends he doesn’t know what it feels like to starve, or watch people die. He gets a job, making money to buy a bike like the one his dad used to ride, but mostly to keep himself busy. And he starts to wonder, again, when he’ll meet his soulmate, because it’s a goal and a distraction and it’s easier than making plans for himself. He thinks about going to find him, when he turns 16, getting on his bike and driving south and hoping that some sort of instinct will lead him there. 

It’s a good plan. So he starts to look for clues in every dream. He keeps a list, draws pictures of landmarks he sees, and he thinks he has it narrowed down to somewhere in Mississippi. 

And then Jim dreams of a wedding. 

He’s standing by a church altar, and the room is full of people. Everyone’s in their finest clothes, and there he is, Jim’s soulmate, looking devastatingly handsome in a tuxedo. His tie is a little crooked and Jim wants to reach out and straighten it. 

For a heart-clenching moment he thinks he’s dreaming of a future. Of their future. And he smiles at his soulmate who seems to be smiling back. 

But then his head turns, his gaze drawn away. And Jim follows his gaze. 

A bride is walking down the aisle. She’s a meringue of white, lacy veil hiding her face. The organ plays the wedding march and she walks, stopping by the altar, close enough to Jim that he steps back, even though he knows she can’t tell he’s there. 

Hands reach out and lift her veil, and Jim sees her face. He recognises her. She’s been in the dreams a lot lately. For months, really. Long enough that he’d forgotten about her, as if she was a piece of the furniture, not worth his notice. 

It takes him longer than it should to realise what’s going on. 

His soulmate takes her hand, and the priest starts to talk. He says things about richer and poorer, sickness and health. 

Until death do them part. 

Jim wakes up sweating and swearing, his heart racing. 

“How could he?” he says out loud. He knows it’s childish and petulant. He knows his soulmate probably doesn’t dream about him. He knows it’s unreasonable. But he feels betrayed. 

It was supposed to be Jim. Jim was supposed to get the happy ending, even if he didn’t think he deserved it. But it was something he’d started to let himself believe. Let himself hope for. 

He scrubs his hands over his eyes and tries to pretend it wasn’t real, that it didn’t happen. 

But the next night, and the night after, and the night after that all show the same thing. His soulmate, married to a woman Jim barely noticed. And he seems happy. 

It all stops mattering, all of a sudden. Jim doesn’t see the point in working towards a future he’ll never have. His grades slip enough that he decides to just not go back to school. He picks fights just to feel something other than anger. And he finds solace in other warm bodies that mean nothing to him. 

Winona doesn’t say a word, just watches him with tired eyes. 

When he turns 17 he tells her he’ll be okay on his own, and that she should go back into space. 

He doesn’t think she’ll believe him, but she does. 

By 18 he’s been on his own long enough that it doesn’t bother him anymore. He makes a decent enough wage fixing things. He’s always been good with computers and machines, and it’s enough to get by. He sleeps as little as possible, to keep the dreams at bay, but mostly they’ve been of his soulmate finishing medical school, working in a hospital and saving lives, and Jim can pretend, sometimes, that he’s the one waiting at home at the end of a long shift, not his soulmate’s wife. 

He sees it coming, but the night that he dreams and sees a baby in his soulmate’s arms, he knows it’s all over. With the marriage, there’d been a glimmer of hope that it wouldn’t work. But now there’s a child, and probably more to follow. He’d been able to hope that his soulmate would be miserable enough in his marriage to leave, to somehow seek Jim out. But he’s not enough of an asshole to hope that he’ll walk out on a kid, too. Growing up without a father means that Jim can’t wish that on anyone. 

The next day he discovers that drinking until you black out is a pretty effective method of chasing the dreams away. And so that becomes a thing he does. When the dreams get too much, he drinks. 

They filter through, sometimes, and it would be easier if he stayed in the corner, tried not to watch, but he’s curious. He sees his soulmate work miracles on the operating table. He watches him play with his daughter. He watches him kiss his wife, and watches the drawn look on both their faces. 

He hates that he knows his soulmate is unhappy, and that he can’t do anything about it. Every so often he gets on his bike and considers heading south, finding him, turning up on his doorstep and tearing his life apart. 

But he can’t do it. And he doesn’t think he’d be believed. He still doesn’t even know his soulmate's name. 

So he carries on drinking and fighting and fucking and working enough to get by. It’s not much of an existence, but it’s the cards Jim’s been dealt, and he has no right to complain. And the dreams pretty much stop. 

It all catches up with him in the end. He meets Pike, and suddenly he’s agreeing to go to Starfleet. Jim can’t deny that he’s thought about it. More than once. He knows that it would make Winona proud. Would give him a purpose. But he’s also pretty sure he’s going to fuck it up. 

Not that he lets on to Pike. He gets cocky about it, brags that he’ll finish in three years instead of four. He knows that it’ll mean not drinking, that it’ll mean accepting the dreams back into his head. But this is an opportunity he can’t pass up. He knows Pike has to pull about a dozen strings to get Jim accepted, and for the first time in ages, there’s someone in his life he can’t let down. 

He sits in the shuttle and makes eyes at Uhura, who seems disgusted by him, which Jim thinks is fair considering the state of him. 

Then there’s a commotion from the bathroom and a man is ushered out and lead to the seat beside him. 

And Jim’s heart stops. 

Because he can’t be seeing this. 

He pinches the inside of his arm to make sure he’s awake, and it stings like a bitch. 

Jim looks away. He can’t look. He can’t be here. 

“I may throw up on you.” It’s a familiar drawl, stronger in reality than it was in any dream. 

And Jim finally looks at him. 

It’s his soulmate. He’d know him anywhere. He’s seen that face for seventeen years of his life, watched it change from youthful softness to strong masculine angles. And those eyes...Jim has waited a long time for them to meet his own, to finally see him. 

He hears himself answering, although later he can’t remember what he says. He barely registers what his soulmate is saying. He just watches the mouth form words that he can hear clearer than he’s ever done before. He thinks that the dreams haven’t done justice to his voice or his face or his body. He’s so real that Jim aches to reach out and touch him.  

A flask is thrust at him, and yes, god yes, Jim needs a drink. 

He introduces himself, and just like he’d hoped, his soulmate reciprocates. 

“McCoy,” he says. “Leonard McCoy.”

Jim rolls the name around in his brain. Finally, there’s a name to go with the face he knows so well. 

McCoy... Leonard... Jim doesn’t know how to think of him. Both seem so formal, for someone he’s known almost as long as he can remember. And he doesn’t know if he can bring himself to say the name out loud, in case it makes him disappear. He casts for something to say, for something to call him. And he thinks about something he’d said earlier. 

“So,  _ Bones _ ,” Jim says, and the other man rolls his eyes at the nickname but doesn’t protest, “you said you’re divorced?”

“That’s the nice way of putting it,” Bones says. “Eviscerated. Destroyed. Those are better words. I’m not joking when I say she got everything. Damn lawyers.”

“What about your daughter?” Jim asks, without thinking. 

Bones gives him an odd look. “Jocelyn has sole custody. How’d you know?”

Jim shrugs. “Lucky guess?”

Bones snorts. “Well, I’ve used up all of my luck, so maybe some of yours will rub off on me. Tell me, kid, if you came home and found your wife fucking your closest friend, who also happens to be your boss, you’d get drunk and punch a wall, right?”

Jim thinks about all of the times he’s watched Bones with someone else, how angry it had made him. How drunk he’d been for years trying to block out the idyllic life he’d assumed Bones had been living. He just nods. 

“Turns out that’s exactly what her lawyers wanted me to do. Used it against me. Tore me to shreds. Starfleet’s the last place I have left to turn.” There’s such misery in his eyes, that Jim doesn’t know how he missed it before. He wants to reach out and hug him, to tell him it’s going to be okay. 

Instead he settles for a gentle pat on the knee. He expects his hand to pass through, as if he’s not really there, but Bones’s knee is solid and warm and real under his touch, and Jim resists the urge to leave his hand in place. 

“What about you, kid? What brings you here?” 

Jim can feel Bones’s eyes on him, taking in his blood-stained shirt and blackening eye. 

“I’m following my destiny,” Jim says, giving Bones a wry smile. 

Bones makes a face. “Well good luck with that. I think it’s a pile of horseshit myself.”

“You don’t believe in fate?”

Bones shrugs. 

“What about soulmates?” Jim can’t help but hold his breath. 

“Well, considering the woman I thought was my soulmate got married three days after the divorce was finalised, I’m going to go with no.”

Jim’s heart sinks a little, then he offers a small smile. “Maybe she just wasn’t your soulmate.”

Bones huffs out a laugh that’s absent of humour. “I hope you’re right, kid. I really hope you’re right.”

When the shuttle lands, Jim loses track of Bones. He gets swept up in the flurry of activity that is admissions and registration, signing up for classes and meeting his roommate. 

But that night he dreams of Bones, sees him walking into his new room – he’s got a single, the lucky bastard – and looking around in relief. For all of his bluster, for all of his pain, he seems almost happy to be at Starfleet. And that makes the ache in Jim’s heart ease a little. 

He sees Bones in person a few days later at one of their orientation classes. And part of him wants to run and hide, because there’s something real about it now, and that scares Jim. He’d wondered about his soulmate. Wanted to meet him, to know him. But now that he has, he isn’t entirely sure what to do. And Jim hates being unsure. 

But a bigger part of him is drawn to Bones, so he walks over and slides into the vacant seat beside him, cutting off a blond man who gives Jim an annoyed look and stalks off. 

“How’s it going, Bones?” Jim asks, nudging him with his shoulder. Even though it’s through layers of clothing, a thrill runs through him. 

“Oh, it’s you,” Bones says, but he doesn’t sound displeased. He even throws Jim a wry smile. “I feel like a kindergartener learning my ABCs,” he adds. “And at the same time I feel like a grandpa who’s crashed a high school party.”

“You’re not that ancient, old man,” Jim says, laughing. “You’re only 28.”

Bones raises an eyebrow. “Have you hacked into my file?” 

“No,” Jim says, and it’s true. He’d considered it. He could do it, and not get caught, but somehow it doesn’t seem right. He already knows more about Bones than Bones knows about him. And he thinks he’d like to change that. 

Bones huffs. “How old are you, kid?”

“22,” Jim says, flashing him a slow smirk. “Old enough to be legal for everything fun, but young enough to still enjoy it.”

That makes Bones laugh for real, and the sound coils inside Jim’s stomach and settles there happily. 

They sit through the seminar, and afterwards walk to the cafeteria together, talking about a whole lot of nothing and a little bit of everything. It’s comfortable, between the two of them. Conversation flows easily, even though Jim has to bite his tongue at times, to stop himself revealing that he already knows so much about Bones’s life. 

He’s gone back and forth in his head over the years, about whether it’s really a gift, or a curse. He thinks now that it’s a bit of both. The gift of knowing who his soulmate is, but the curse of his soulmate being a cynic who’ll probably think Jim is high on something illegal if he tells him. 

They see each other around campus enough that Jim hardly has to plan it. They have a handful of classes together, and it turns out that Bones is rostered on to the campus clinic. Jim watches Bones there in his dreams sometimes, and when some friends of the cadets he’d fought in the bar catch up with him, he ends up waiting for him on a biobed. 

“You look like shit,” Bones says when he sees Jim. 

“You should see the other guys,” Jim quips back, and Bones rolls his eyes. 

“I think I did. They barely had a scratch on them.”

Bones reaches out and grabs Jim’s chin, tilting his face up towards the light. He winces, in what Jim assumes is sympathy. 

“Nose isn’t broken,” he says, “although you’ve broken it before, a few times I’d say. Just some bruising around the eye socket and…”

He pauses, giving Jim a scrutinising look. “Two broken ribs,” he finishes with a sigh.

Jim doesn’t know how he knows, but there’s definitely a pain in his side that he wishes would go away, so he shrugs, and instantly regrets it. 

Bones lifts up his shirt, attaching a regen in place over the ribs without even bothering to scan him. 

“How’d you know it was right there?” Jim asks, and Bones makes a face at him. 

“Jim,” he says patiently. “I’m a doctor.”

Jim smiles. “A good one,” he agrees, thinking of all of the times he’s dreamt of Bones in surgery, saving lives. He feels proud, and safe. 

Bones snatches his hand back from where he’s been prodding Jim’s chest and frowns at him, looking confused. And for a horrible moment Jim thinks that maybe Bones’s gift is reading minds. That he knows what Jim was thinking. 

“What’s your gift?” he blurts out. It’s something Jim has wondered about for a long time, never having seen any obvious gifts in his dreams. It’s a fairly innocuous question, but Bones looks hesitant anyway. 

Then his shoulders lower from around his ears, and he gives Jim a steady look. 

“Empathy,” he says. “Which is hilarious in too many ways to count.”

Jim frowns. “You can sense what people are feeling?” He starts to panic, wondering what exactly his emotions had revealed when Bones had been touching him. 

“Something like that,”  Bones says. He lets Jim’s shirt drop back down and regards him thoughtfully for a moment. 

“When I touch people,” he explains, “I can get the briefest glimpse of their emotions. It’s stronger in some more than others. Happy, sad, things like that. But I can also sense pain. Sometimes even pain that they’re not fully aware of. So it helps me know where to fix them, where to make the cuts so I can sew them back together again.”

“So you could feel my ribs?” 

Bones nods. He gives Jim a funny look again. “And trust. And something else that I didn’t catch.”

Jim stops the sigh of relief, swallows it down. 

“I’ve never had anyone who didn’t know me feel that way before,” Bones says. “Trust, I mean. Bedside manner isn’t exactly my strong suit.”

Jim smiles. “Come on. I bet everyone knows that this gruff exterior is hiding a marshmallowy centre.” He keeps his tone light, and Bones gives him a half smile in return. 

“And inside that marshmallowy centre is more gruffness wrapped around bitterness and a bottle of bourbon.” Bones takes out a scanner and starts running it over Jim’s head. “So what’s yours?”

“My gift?” Jim hesitates, wondering what lie he can come up with that’s plausible, that he won’t be caught out for later. His imagination fails him. “I dream. About my soulmate.”

“How do you know?” Bones asks. He puts the scanner down, and lifts Jim’s shirt again to check the regen, adjusting the settings. “How do you know they’re your soulmate?”

Jim opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. How does he know? Because a computer told him when he was a kid? 

“You make a very good point,” he says. 

“So what are they like, this supposed soulmate of yours?” Bones asks. He has the scanner out again, and Jim can’t tell if Bones talks to all his patients like this, when he’s trying to distract them, or if Jim is just special.

Jim shrugs, and this time it doesn’t hurt. “I’ll tell you once I find out.”

When Bones discharges him, Jim goes back to his dorm room and lies awake for a long time, thinking about it. He really doesn’t know Bones all that well. And while he feels a connection, there needs to be something more. Especially if he’s ever going to convince Bones that soulmates are real. 

The answer is pretty obvious – they need to become friends. And Jim is excellent at making friends with people. 

Bones proves to be no exception. It’s almost as if he’s hungry for companionship, and he has friends from the clinic and friends from his classes, but as the months pass and they settle into the Academy, he spends most of his spare time with him. 

Which is just fine by Jim. Because the more he knows Bones, the more he’s convinced that they’re meant to be together. They fit, even when they shouldn’t. Jim makes other friends who seem a bit baffled by his relationship with the grumpy doctor, and Jim knows that Bones’s friends must wonder the same thing. But it works. 

By the end of their first year, they’re pretty much inseparable, and when Bones accidentally calls Jim his best friend – on the phone to his mother, explaining why he’s not coming home from the summer because of clinic hours and pilot courses that Jim insists they take and the fact that Jim doesn’t have anywhere to go so they both might as well stay in the Bay area – Jim’s heart starts beating with a new vigour. 

But it’s pretty clear that friendship is all Bones wants from him. And that’s fine with Jim. For now. He watches Bones hesitantly go on dates that his colleagues fix him up on, and watches Bones come home and throw his hands in the air and announce he’ll never try dating again. And Jim goes out too. He goes drinking and dancing, and he goes home with cadets and civilians alike. But he never stays the night. It feels wrong, dishonest, to lie in someone else’s bed and dream of Bones when he’s probably alone in the room he and Jim now share. 

Second year passes and third year begins and somewhere along the way Jim realises that he’s in love with Bones. It’s an odd realisation, because of course he loves Bones. He’s loved Bones since he first started dreaming about him. Loved him like Bones was part of himself – maybe the only part of himself that Jim ever really felt deserved love. 

But now he’s in love with him. Head over heels in love. Which is pretty inconvenient because Jim might be smart, and a lot of the Academy courses come surprisingly easy to him, but they’re piling the work on. It’s six months until graduation and there is so much to do that Jim struggles to find the strength to fight the compulsion to touch Bones. It’s something that he’s avoided as much as possible, touching Bones anywhere that isn’t covered by clothing. When Bones fixes him up – which happens regularly enough that Bones doesn’t even gripe at him anymore, just grabs his medkit – Jim thinks very hard about where he’s hurting, and pushes his emotions down. Bones has shown no sign of picking up on Jim’s feelings, and Jim’s done a pretty good job of covering whenever he says things that he shouldn’t know about Bones’s day, things he only knows because he sees them in his dreams. He’s pretty sure Bones is convinced Jim hacks into databases and video feeds, and Jim’s done nothing to sway him from that opinion. 

The Kobayashi Maru almost fucks everything up. Jim fails. Twice. And Jim hates to fail, at least if it’s something he’s trying very hard not to fail at. So he hatches a plan and it works and he can’t keep the smug grin off his face as he leaves the simulation bay. 

He’s so happy that he practically skips from the room. He’s crowing and gloating and definitely not watching where he’s going. Which is how he manages to trip down a flight of stairs like an idiot. 

“Jim!” Bones is there instantly, before Jim’s head has stopped spinning and he figures out what happened. Uhura stalks past, looking down her nose at him, which Jim guesses he deserves. 

Jim climbs to his feet and winces, and Bones pushes him back down. 

“Let me see your ankle,” he demands, and he’s pushing up Jim’s pant leg before Jim can argue. 

His ankle doesn’t hurt that much. Mostly what he feels right now is the euphoria of success. And a whole mess of emotions about Bones. He looks at the top of Bones’s head, with his stupid slicked down hair that Jim wants to run his fingers through and mess up, and thinks about how grateful he is that Bones is his soulmate. He thinks about how safe he feels, how right it is, how much trust he has in this man. And he thinks about how much he loves him. 

Bones’s fingers tighten around his ankle, and his head snaps up. 

“Shit,” Jim says.

“What did I just feel?” Bones demands. His voice is low and scared and a bit dangerous. 

“Bones,” Jim starts. “I–”

Bones just stares at him, and Jim doesn’t know what to do or say. So he blurts it out. All of it. That he dreams of Bones. That Bones is his soulmate. He tells him everything, there at the bottom of the stairs, in the middle of campus with people passing by, and he doesn’t care anymore. And when Bones looks sceptical, he tells Bones details that he couldn’t possibly know, and watches Bones’s face blanch. 

Bones doesn’t break their gaze for Jim’s entire monologue. But when Jim is done, and there’s nothing more to say, unless Bones starts talking back, he stands up, and takes Jim by the elbow. 

They walk back to their dorm room in silence. Jim is twitchy and anxious, and Bones looks the same. He can’t tell if his emotions are so strong that Bones picks it up through his clothing, or if Bones feels the same way. 

Back in their room, he sits Jim on the bed, and fetches his medkit. He’s careful not to touch Jim’s bare skin, using a scanner instead, before wrapping it up in an old fashioned bandage. 

“I have to go to the clinic,” Bones says eventually, which is a lie. 

“Bones,” Jim says. Every time he’d thought about telling Bones, it had never gone like this. Bones had been angry, or happy, or confused. But never like this. Never wary and shut down. 

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Jim,” Bones says. “Apparently I’m your soulmate and we’ve known each other for more than two years now and you never once thought to mention it. I don’t even know if I believe in soulmates, but you’ve been dreaming of me for almost two decades? You’ve been watching me this whole time. It’s...”

“It’s not like I had a choice,” Jim interrupts before Bones can say ‘creepy’ or ‘gross’ or anything else that would make Jim’s heart ache. “It’s my gift. I can’t control it.”

“Well, it’s a pretty shitty gift,” Bones snaps back. “You should take it back for a refund. Because I’m not anyone’s soulmate. No sane person would want me.”

“Then I guess I’m not sane,” Jim says, and Bones’s face twists painfully. 

“Don’t,” he says. “Just...I need to go. Keep your foot elevated, use that hypo if it hurts too much to sleep, and ice it if the swelling doesn’t go down by the morning.”

And then he’s gone. 

Jim uses the hypospray immediately, in the hopes that it’ll numb not only the pain in his ankle, but also the pain in his heart and in his head. 

He wonders if Bones will come back. He wonders if Bones will come around, and accept it. He wonders if Bones will ever love him. 

Bones doesn’t come back that night at all, and when Jim dreams, he sees Bones pacing back and forth at the clinic, looking tired and confused. 

When he wakes up the next morning, Bones still hasn’t come home, and Jim stays in bed all weekend, living off protein bars and beer. He doesn’t see Bones, and he doesn’t dream either night.  

By Monday morning his ankle feels fine, which is good. An urgent assembly has been called and Jim puts on his cadet reds and falls into line with everyone else. As he shuffles in to take a seat, he feels a hand on his shoulder, and he’s surprised when he turns to see Bones. 

“Bones,” he begins, but Bones shakes his head. 

“We’ll talk after,” he says. And he looks worried, which makes Jim worry too. 

His worry doesn’t go unfounded. As he stands to face the accusations, Jim wonders if Bones had known, or if he’d suspected. And he appreciates the support, even if he can still feel Bones’s anger and confusion radiating off him, as if Jim’s the one with the gift of empathy. 

But the hearing is interrupted, and everyone rushes to the shuttles and Jim is grounded. And it’s frustrating, and galling. Jim is not the kind of guy who can sit on his hands. He needs to be in the thick of it. He needs to help. 

But he shakes Bones’s hand and lets him go and wonders if tonight he’ll dream of Bones on board the Enterprise, where Jim should be too. Then an arm grabs his elbow, and he wonders if Bones could feel how dejected he was when their hands touched. 

He also wonders if the pain Bones inflicts on him to get him on board the shuttle, then on board the ship, is a not so subtle bit of revenge for everything Jim had kept from him. 

He wakes up from a dreamless sleep and knows something is wrong. And Bones is there, following him through the ship, trusting him. 

Jim turns out to be right. And then everything happens so fast that he doesn’t get to think about anything other than the fact that Bones is okay, but he won’t be if they don’t survive this. And Vulcan won’t be if they don’t save the planet. 

For the first time in his life, Jim manages to push all of his worries aside, and focus on what needs to be done. 

He hardly even thinks about Bones until Spock is ordering him off the ship and Bones just stands there, watching. He doesn’t fight to keep Jim there, and that hurts more than anything, because he’s pretty sure he’s lost Bones’s trust. And that makes his entire body ache. He thinks about that as he tramps across the godforsaken ice planet, and wonders whether the next time he dreams – if he’s lucky enough to survive that long – he’ll dream of Bones dying on board the Enterprise, along with everyone else. 

~~~ 

Somehow, everything goes their way. Every gamble pays off, and everyone’s looking at Jim like they’ve never seen him before. Bones especially. 

There’s a lot to do as they limp back to Earth at impulse. Jim spends a lot of time with Spock, checking on the crew and ship systems, making plans and contingencies. It turns out that when you’re captain, there’s a whole lot more to do than give orders to your very capable crew. Mostly there’s just a lot of paperwork, and Jim spends longer than he’d like on calls to various Starfleet Admirals, half of whom look like they want to kiss him, while the other half narrow their eyes at him and ask him questions he can’t possibly answer. 

When he finally gets away, he goes to sickbay. 

Bones has been operating on Pike for almost eight hours. Jim watches from the observation room, seeing Bones sway on his feet. He must be as exhausted as Jim but he keeps going, and as Jim watches a nurse presses a hypospray to his neck. 

Bones perks up immediately, and Jim frowns, worrying how many stims Bones has taken. It works though, and the surgery continues. It’s intricate and delicate, removing the slug from Pike’s central nervous system. It takes Jim a while to notice that Bones keeps pausing to rest the part of his forearm not covered in surgical gown or gloves against Pike’s bare skin. And he realises that Bones is using his gift, trying to find the pain, trying to heal it. 

Jim feels so much gratitude towards Bones, so much love and relief. And Bones looks up suddenly, and meets Jim’s eyes. Jim smiles at him, wondering if Bones can feel his emotions, even through the glass wall separating them. 

Then Bones turns his attention back to his patient, and Jim watches in silence for two more hours until the operation is complete. Bones turns to him again and gives him a nod, and Jim lets out a heavy sigh. Pike will be okay. It’s something positive to report to his superiors, which is what he hurries off to do. 

That night, Jim sleeps in the captain's quarters, where Pike should be sleeping instead of sickbay. He dreams of Bones, who is in another room, similar to Jim’s but smaller. And Bones is pacing, muttering to himself, running his hands through his hair. He looks like a man going through a crisis, and Jim wants to reach out, to put his arms around him and comfort him. To tell him that, somehow, everything will be okay. Jim doesn’t know if those words are true, but he needs to believe them. 

He watches as Bones’s head snaps up, looking towards the door. Bones looks around his room one more time, then stomps out. Jim follows him down the corridor a short distance, until Bones stops in front of another door. Jim can’t read the number, but he watches Bones override the controls and step inside. 

Jim wakes up suddenly. There’s a figure at the foot of his bed, and he orders the lights on, heart racing, mind conjuring up memories of Nero and the fear he’d felt. 

But it’s just Bones, staring down at him. His mouth is drawn in a thin line, and he’s frowning even more than usual. 

“Were you dreaming of me?” he demands. 

Jim nods, and Bones lets out a breath slowly. “I felt...like I wasn’t alone.”

“Sorry,” Jim says quietly. He pushes himself up until he’s sitting, pulling the blankets around him. The room is an ambient temperature, but he feels cold. 

“No,” Bones says, lips twitching like they want to smile. “I...I liked it. It’s been a long time since I haven’t felt alone.”

“Bones,” Jim whispers, heart aching. 

“Jim. Look. I don’t know if I believe in this whole soulmates thing. I don’t think you’d make it up, because why would you choose me if you did?”

“Because you’re brave and caring and smart and–” Jim interrupts, and is silenced by Bones’s glare. 

“I’m not fishing for compliments,” he snaps. “I’m just stating facts. I’m no catch. Either you’re a liar with terrible taste, or you genuinely believe we’re soulmates. So. I don’t even know if I believe in love anymore. My marriage was a disaster.”

“I know,” Jim says. 

“And I’m a disaster half the time.”

“I know,” Jim says. 

“And you’re kind of a disaster, too,” Bones adds, accusingly, and Jim grins. 

“Guilty as charged.”

“But I think, that if I am capable of feeling love, that’s how I feel about you right now. And if there are such things as soulmates, I guess that’s you for me.”

“So what does that mean?” Jim asks. He’s shifted so he’s kneeling in front of Bones, looking up at him. His blanket has fallen away, but he feels warmer now, like the heat from the blood being frantically pumped around his body is warming him, waking him. 

“It means you should kiss me before I change my mind,” Bones says, and Jim doesn’t wait for a second invitation. 

Jim has dreamt of this since he first understood what kissing was. He’s imagined Bones’s lips against his own. And, once again, his imagination pales in comparison to the real thing. 

Bones kisses him firmly, and his stubble rasps against Jim’s cheeks. His hands grasp the bare skin of Jim’s biceps, and Jim wants to ask Bones what emotions he can feel, but he doesn’t want to break the kiss. Bones laughs against his mouth, and Jim wonders if he’d sensed that somehow. 

“You should sleep some more,” Bones says, eventually. “Doctor’s orders.”

Jim wants to protest, but Bones moves to the other side of the bed, kicks off his shoes and slides in next to him. 

“We’re just going to sleep,” Bones says. “For now. Just because we’re soulmates doesn’t mean we need to rush into anything.”

And Jim smiles and slides his arm across Bones’s waist and thinks that he’ll wait as long as Bones needs him to. 

~~~ 

Now when Jim dreams of Bones, he sees himself too. He’s never seen himself in the dreams, even after all these years of friendship. He thinks maybe that means something. 

He gets to watch as he and Bones work on a different kind of relationship. It’s slow, but worth it, and it gives Jim an odd appreciation for everything, watching the two of them together. 

It’s humbling, too, to see himself as others see him. He gets to relive little moments, to see how the crew regard him, and it helps shape him as a captain months later when Starfleet take a huge leap of faith and hand the Enterprise back to him. 

Bones is there, of course, as CMO, despite his protestations that he wants a job somewhere safe and with a non-artificial atmosphere. But he follows Jim anyway, and even if Bones still says he’s not entirely sure what love is, Jim knows that Bones wouldn’t go with him for any other reason. 

He gets to relive the moments he and Bones share, too. It means he gets to see all of Bones’s smiles over and over. Gets to see all of their firsts for a second time, catching expressions he may have missed. And sometimes he gets to see himself nestled in Bones’s arms, and sees himself looking as content as he’s ever been.  

Jim remembers all of the times he’d wished for a more exciting gift, a more important one. He’s glad those wishes were never answered, because his gift has given him Bones, who is exciting and important and, maybe best of all,  _ his _ . 


End file.
